ABSTRACT
George Sternlieb set me an impossible task when he asked me to contribute to this conference, if, that is, one contemplates a fully responsive answer. "How can the planner be a change agent in an only moderately reactive economic system?" he asked. "Is a planning task to sort out what is and what is not achievable in both the short and the long run?" "Are there within-system, activities that may be undertaken to maximize the quality of life?" "Who are the planners of such activities, and what skills should they have?" Like a naive and foolish social scientist, I agreed to prepare a paper full of answers-which explains in part why I vacillated so long about the task of writing. The other reason is that, in moving from Geography at Chicago to the School of Design at Harvard, I have switched from the world of the social scientist to that of planning, falling now I suppose more clearly than before within the rubric of Marcuse's social scientist turned practitioner in the arena of public policy-one of the characters dissected so ably in the paper by Irving Louis Horowitz.
